the mind

Thinking and Feeling Are the Products of the Brain's Physical Architecture

Many students of the mind have observed that consciousness—as a word or as a concept—is a placeholder, a suitcase word for multiple processes in our brains. Those processes are systems in our brains that are made of physical matter; they chug away, following physical laws, to generate our felt state, our subjective sense of life. And somehow, in the entirety of their collective actions, we are aware, we feel, we love, we sit on the porch in the evening and enjoy the sunset.